Singapore's QR payment landscape has come a long way, but acceptance is not yet fully interoperable. Customers may still find that their preferred banking or payment app does not work at a particular QR merchant. For inbound visitors, cards work well across much of Singapore, but gaps remain at hawker centres and smaller merchants, where those without supported payment apps may still need to use cash.

PayNow Generation 2 has outlined the next step: a proposed SGQR+ switch that would provide a common routing layer across participating payment schemes and merchant networks, while preserving existing infrastructure and merchant-acquiring relationships. The opportunity is broader acceptance without requiring every network to establish separate connections with every other network.

But interoperability is not just a technical question. It is also a commercial and operational one. Who pays when a transaction crosses networks? How should it be routed and settled? What happens when something goes wrong? And can broader acceptance be delivered without undermining the low-cost economics that merchants value? These are among the design questions that still need to be worked through.

This session brings together payment networks and ecosystem players to examine what a more interoperable QR future could mean at the merchant counter: broader domestic and tourist acceptance, scalable network connectivity, sustainable economics and a payment experience that merchants can rely on transaction after transaction.